Contact centers are systems that enable agents to serve incoming and/or outgoing calls, with the calls being distributed and connected to whichever of the agents is available to handle the call. When no agents are free and available to handle an incoming call, additional incoming calls are typically placed in a holding queue to await an available agent. Unfortunately, contact center holding queues offer no visual indication of an expected wait time to a caller (like a physical queue does for a person waiting in a line), and as a result the callers may experience frustration and impatience while holding. After some time has passed callers may even abandon their call, solely because they do not know how long they must wait in order to connect with an available agent.
It is a feature of modern contact centers to provide callers with estimated wait times while they are holding in a given queue. Among other things, some of the benefits achieved by providing callers with estimated wait times include increasing customer satisfaction as well as trust between the caller and the contact center while at the same time dramatically reducing the number of abandoned calls that were placed into a given holding queue. However, it is the accuracy of a predictor that is critical to providing callers with trusted estimated wait times.
To provide callers with more accurate estimated wait time predictions, contact centers may utilize a number of different predictors. One example of a prior art wait time prediction solution is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,506,898, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated herein by reference. In general, the '898 reference describes a methodology for predicting wait time in a contact center queue of contacts. As can be appreciated, these wait time predictors may vary in their overall mathematical complexity as well as their demand on available resources (e.g., processing power, time to process, storage, etc.). For example, a contact center may utilize a predictor that determines estimated wait time by calculating the average call holding time for all calls of a particular class, and then subtracting the time an agent has spent on the call up to the point at which the estimate is made. Other predictors may utilize highly complex formulas and algorithms to provide very accurate results. However, these complex predictors tend to utilize more processing power and contact center resources.
Typically, a contact center utilizes a single algorithm type to predict wait times. Therefore, the amount of resources used by the algorithm is generally fixed. It would be advantageous to use less complex algorithms at times when the generated estimated wait time result would only vary slightly from a result generated by a more complex algorithm.